Welcome back to a new posting about the Oracle Container Cloud service(OCCS). In my previous OCCS blog posting I went through some details of the brand new OCCS.

In the following webcast I try to measure some key characteristics like DNS lookup and ping times for major industry websites such as cloud.oracle.com, google.com and munzandmore.com. All the measurements are done from probes running in various capitals throughout the world. The important thing to understand is that we not measuring times from the Oracle Cloud to somewhere.

The results actually show that cloud.oracle.com is on a par with google.com and both obviously beat my own domain which is not a big surprise.

Grafana is visualizing the results of these probes. It is running in a Docker container which is running on Oracle Container Cloud Service (OCCS) – the newest addition to the Oracle Cloud.

Enjoy the webcast. Let me know if you have some interesting findings about measurements with Grafana and the worldping plugin or the Oracle Container Cloud service! For sure I will post more about it later.

In this article I will provide a number of tips and tricks I discovered while exploring OCCS.

Keep in mind that OCCS is the newest addition in the Oracle Cloud portfolio. Everything I tried was stable so far. Note that this article – like all my other articles actually – reflect my opinion . Maybe some of the items below will help you to get your containers running easier!

This list is not complete yet and I will extend it as I discover new things around OCCS. Drop me a comment below if there is anything you want to be added here. I am curious about your own experiences.

OCCS Tips and Tricks

Do you have trouble logging into Oracle Cloud? I recommend to have a look at my other posting and check here.

The provisioning of the service (i.e. the underlying machine) seems to depend on the instance size. Small instances are provisioned in the range of several minutes. However in the Europe 2 data center I waited between 2h and 3h until the service was provisioned on a OC3 instance. Let me know if your experience is different e.g. the provisioning is faster in the US.

Starting up a container is much quicker than provisioning the underlying service.

The container console itself is surprisingly well hidden. It had to look into the tutorial to find it :-(. You can find it here:

If you want to start an OCCS container with a docker image that is started with a -d flag from the command-line, don’t worry. OCCS runs all containers as daemons, so you don’t have to provide this flag.

If something went wrong and you look for log output of your container, then check underContainer / Name / View Logs.

Sometimes you will experience that containers are “flapping”. This means they are started but run into an error. Then they are started again, etc. Check the logs to find out what is happening and stop the container.– this posting will be continued once I discover more tips and tricks for OCCS.

If you run the classic example

docker run hello-world

the container will be restarted once it is finished, so technically it will be flapping. It is quite likely that OCCS will support a flag in the future to run special containers only once. Note that this is not the typical enterprise use case anyway but more more a first step of what devops try on the command-line.

You can use SSH to connect to the OCCS manager nodes, however you cannot connect to the worker nodes as of now. The manager node is running a very restricted VM environment with some essential tools like vi, cat, rm, cp etc. only. To connect to the master node use the private key that was generated when you set up the service and the following syntax:

The Container Console is using a self signed root certificate and therefore creating a browser warning. This is nothing severe but Oracle should document a way to install your own X.509 certs to avoid the warning.

From 10,000 feet OCCS might look vaguely similar to Kubernetes, but OCCS is not based on Kubernetes. Actually Kubernetes is more complex to set up and to operate. OCCS’ goal is “to provide an easy and powerful way for enterprises to run their containers on our service”.

At the end, your goal should be to be able to run your own Docker image on OCCS. Give it a try!

Oracle Technology Tour 2016: Lima

I have been there for the second time now, and Lima is always a good to me. I like the city, its food, its people, and the great places to go. This year I was staying closer to the sea and the popular Larcomar.

The Conference

The OTN Lima 2016 conference was in a more central hotel and offered a number of great auditoriums. I gave 2 books away based on the number guessing game that I learned from Heli. Before I gifting them they were perfectly guarded at the ladies at the reception. Seemed like none of my books ever got more attention :-).

After my presentation I had some good discussions and one even involved me drawing some impromptu technical solution design at the white board. So everyone was happy at the end.

The Non-Conference Part

With 3 hours left in Lima I headed to one of the best Ceviche places (according to 3 out of 3 cab drivers!) – instead of going directly to the airport with some extra headspace. Obviously I arrived late at the airport but it was worth it. Lovely food, fab atmosphere, great people and good music at the ceviche place place vs. 30 minutes more waiting at the airport. Should I post the name of the restaurant here? Those in the know can tell from the pic I guess.

Oracle Technology Network Tour Latam 2016:
Santiago de Chile

The conference in Chile was exceptional for a couple of reasons. For the first time ever I met German, the tech reviewer of my WebLogic 12c book. A great guy (not sure if he wants to read his name here – just get the book, he is in the acknowledgement!) who did a brilliant job in editing the 12c book. We had lunch together with his friends from Oracle ACS and the best I can say it felt like friends you know for years and not somebody you met 30 minutes ago. It was a pleasure meeting you guys!

Conference

The conference itself was the University San Sebastian in Bellavista area. Quite a few presentations were running in several rooms in parallel.

Also Santiago is great. From every traffic jam you can see the mountains! It is really a pity I couldn’t go to any more remote places like Atacama desert or Torre de Paine. Anyway both are now top on my to-travel list. My friends know what this means. Stay tuned.

Again I did a Docker live demo. The audience seemed to like it, what do you think? Also the room was big enough for big ideas. Big thank you to CLOUG and Felipe Manriquez.

The non Conference Part

I did not really have a lot of time for sightseeing but I managed to nip out and have a seafood lunch at the Mercado Central before heading to airport. Actually a memorable drive, since the Uber driver was driving alongside the runway but was not able to find the airport 🙂

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